Iain Banks - Whit

'I see,' I said. 'Oh well, thank you anyway.' I fished in one of my jacket pockets.

'My pleasure,' he said, smiling. He turned to go, his hair falling over his eye again as he did so.

'Please; with my compliments.' I handed him a Kirbigrip.

'Well,' I said, 'this is all most odd.' Brother Zebediah and I stood on the terrace of the Royal Festival Hall in a mild, blustery river wind, looking across the broad, grey-brown back of the River Thames. Pleasure boats crisscrossed before us, sunlight glinting on their windows as they rocked across the waves and slapped through the scissoring wakes of their fellow craft.

'Yep.'

I turned to face Zeb, arms folded, my back against the railings. Zeb's face looked pinched and jerky somehow. 'But I have seen the poster!' I protested.

'Yep.'

The Royal Festival Hall claimed never to have heard of Cousin Morag; they certainly had not hosted a concert by her at eight o'clock on Tuesday, the 16th of February, 1993, which was - unless my normally accurate and reliable memory was failing me - the date and time detailed on the poster which hung in the hall of the mansion house back in High Easter Offerance and which my Grandfather was so proud of.

The eventually helpful lady member of staff we had been referred to was adamant that no person of that name was known to her, and that indeed there had never been a solo baryton concert in the South Bank complex (at least when I mentioned the instrument itself she had heard of that; I was beginning to wonder if it existed). She was slim, cardiganed and well-spoken and her hair was neatly bunned. I suspected at the time - from her confident manner and general bearing - that I had met a memory as retentive as my own, but knew that one of us must be wrong, and so implored her to check. She invited us to take a seat in the coffee bar and disappeared back into the administrative offices of the building, to reappear with a large, battered-looking thing she called a print-out and which detailed all the events in the various parts of the complex over the year 1993.

'If there had been such a concert it would probably have been more suited to the Purcell Room…" she told us, leafing through the broad, green-lined pages.

'Could the poster have got the year wrong?' I asked.

She looked sour and took off her glasses. 'Well, it certainly didn't happen last year; I'd remember, but if you really want I can check 'ninety-two.'

'I'd be terribly grateful,' I said in a small voice, taking off my hat and trying to look waif-like.

She sighed. 'All right.'

I watched her go. 'Brother Zebediah,' I said to him. He looked startled, as if he had been falling asleep in his seat. 'I think we ought to get the lady a cup of coffee, don't you?'

He looked at me. I nodded towards the serving counter. He looked cross for a moment. 'Me,' he said. 'Always. Me. Paying. Not,' he waved one hand at me. 'Turn?' (I glared at him.) 'No?' he said, faltering.

'Brother Zebediah,' I said, drawing myself up and putting my hat back on. 'I am on a highly important mission with the blessing of and instructions directly from our Founder himself; I do have some emergency funds but otherwise I am relying on the support of the Blessed, whether they adhere strictly to our code or not. I hope you are not already forgetting the gravity of this matter; Morag has been central to our missionary plans for some time now, quite apart from being especially favoured by our dear Founder and due to take centre-stage at the quadrennial Festival. We all have to make sacrifices at such a time, Brother Zebediah, and I am shocked that you should-'

'Right! Okay! Right! All right! I'm going!' he said, interrupting me before I had really had a chance to make my point. He loped off to the counter.

The lady did not want any coffee, which put me at a disadvantage with Brother Zebediah for the rest of the meeting, during which I became convinced that Cousin Morag had indeed never played on the South Bank. I thanked her as she rose to leave and then I sat back, thinking. Zeb drank the cup of cooling coffee with a smug expression and an unnecessary amount of noise.

'No forwarding address, no agent, no concerts; nobody has heard of her!' I exclaimed. 'And her a soloist of international repute!'

'Yup. Weird.'

In such a situation the average person might start to doubt their sanity. However, Luskentyrians have it drummed into them from a very early age that it is the outside world, the world of the billions of Blands, that is obviously, demonstrably, utterly and (in the short term) irredeemably insane, while they themselves have had the immense good luck (or karma, if you like, there's a fine and still debatable theological point at issue here) to be born into the one True Church with a decent grasp of reality and a plausible explanation for everything.

I did not, therefore, even begin to question whether I was in full possession of my faculties (with the singular and brief exception of my memory, as mentioned above), though I was well aware something was seriously out of kilter somewhere, and that as a result my mission was rapidly taking on a degree of complexity and difficulty neither I nor my fellow Officers back at the Community had bargained for.

Urgent action was obviously called for.

What I really needed to do was talk to God.

I think my Grandfather still holds that one of the greatest achievements of his ministry was the conversion of Mr McIlone to the set of beliefs which at the time our Founder was still in the act of formulating. If I say that I suspect it was also an accomplishment my Grandfather found extremely enjoyable and hence craved to repeat, I think I am paying our Founder a compliment, given the intrinsic goodness and holiness of the act concerned.

Mr McIlone was a kindly, generous man, but a free-thinker; an atheist of long standing who had had the strength of will and character - however fundamentally misguided and wrong-headed - to maintain and preserve his sinful belief in the face of the opprobrium and isolationary contempt of a conservative and even self-righteous community of the sort that tends to get called 'close-knit' by those not inclined to search overly long for their images of social cohesion.

While by our creed we must count the dour Presbyterians of the Western Isles, with their cruelly humourless, fear-demanding and vindictive-sounding idea of God, our allies (whether they like it or not), and the humanely compassionate Mr McIlones of this world our evangelical prey at best and outright opponents at worst, and it is undeniably more effective preaching to the already half converted than attempting to plant the seeds of faith in souls hardened by a history of material Falseness, there is nevertheless often more common cause spiritually to be found with those who are naturally generous, sharing, wise and enlightened (but by chance brought up out-with the sight and hearing of God) than with those who - while part of a community or faith whose beliefs are in some strategic sense more in keeping with our own - are by the very strictness and severity of that persuasion individually far less happily unrestricted in the joy of their worship of God and the appreciation of the beauty of the Universe, the World and the Human, in both its spiritual and its physical form.

I think myself that by the sound of it Mr McIlone was one of those sensitive souls prone rather to Despair. He was like my Grandfather in seeing little but cruel idiocy in the actions of his fellow humans, but different from him in choosing for his response the easy, easeful option of simply condemning everybody and turning his back on the world.

From what I have read - and I think I may fairly claim to have read a fair amount, for my age - I think it must have seemed a world worth turning one's back on; the most destructive war in all history was finally over, but only at the cost of ushering in - with those two diabolic nuclear dawns over Japan - an age which seemed to have finally brought the epoch of Apocalypse to earth. The thunderous, earth-shaking power to annihilate whole cities in an instant that Humanity had habitually ascribed to its gods was now at Man's own beck and call, and no god ever seemed so fearful and capricious as the new possessor of that power.